Can we trust the National Trust?

The spectacular wood sculptures by Grinling Gibbons at Petworth House in Sussex have been restored at the hands of the National Trust. But is the master carver getting a rotten deal, asks David Esterly

David Esterly

12:01AM GMT 16 Nov 2002

What's the greatest wood sculpture in Britain? You'd be hard pressed to come up with anything that surpasses Grinling Gibbons's much-loved carvings at Petworth House in Sussex. There, among his trademark cascades of lifelike flowers and fruits, Gibbons interspersed some even more spectacular tour de force sculpture: still-life tableaux of musical instruments, Grecian vases, regalia of state, acanthus leaves in whirling vortexes, and flower baskets that seem to have leapt out of a Dutch painting.

The Petworth carvings were completed in the early 1690s, when Gibbons was at the height of his powers, and they were quickly recognised as masterpieces. The Carved Room became a place of pilgrimage for admirers of Britain's greatest woodcarver. But it also turned out to be a magnet for woodworm and fungi, and, heavily used as a dining room in the 19th century, it was often filled with a discolouring smog of tobacco and chimney smoke.

Nor did the carvings escape careless blows from the hand of man, usually during cleaning attempts. By the end of the 20th century, Gibbons's delicate limewood had deteriorated to a perilous state.

Petworth is now in the hands of the National Trust, which two years ago embarked on a major conservation project aimed at preserving Gibbons's work. A transformed Carved Room was opened last summer, to general applause. The operation was a success, then? And how's the patient doing? Alas, it must be reported that Grinling Gibbons remains comatose. The fate of his Petworth carvings still hangs in the balance.

Conserving a Gibbons carving is a daunting endeavour under the best of circumstances. Carved to airy thinness in the first place, the wood has grown more fragile over the centuries, beset by damage, antiquated repairs, and replacement carving of inferior quality.

Imagine that you are Christopher Rowell, the National Trust curator with particular responsibility for Petworth, staring up at Gibbons's wormhole-riddled, internally weakened, exquisitely breakable masterpieces. Rowell acknowledges his concern about "the structural problems and issues of that sort", but says that he decided to adopt a step-by-step approach with the carvings, "accepting that we would be looking after them for many years. Little-and-often treatment if necessary, but essentially very conservative treatment." A consolidant would be applied to fortify the wood, but in a limited way.

Rowell's chief conservation advisor, the National Trust's John Hart, also argued for a minimalist approach. "The essential thing about the treatment is really that it's not expected to be the final solution. With careful consideration, we feel that it hasn't done any damage, as far as we can see, and if subsequently somebody finds what is considered to be a much better treatment, it could be carried out."

This principle led to a crucial decision: Gibbons's work would not be removed from the wall for treatment, but conserved in situ. The carvings are attached to the panelling with iron nails, which Hart found had rusted into the worm-eaten carvings, so that "it was impossible, really, to get the very wormy ones off without damaging them."

And yet removing such carving to a bench or table for conservation is standard practice today, for excellent reasons. It's impossible to apply a consolidant fully to the carving without access to the backs of its elements, and, without that access, it's difficult to judge the success of the treatment.

Many of the carvings at Petworth need structural reinforcement, realignment, rearrangement, repairs, and repairs of early jerry-rigged repairs, which can be thoroughly carried out only if the carvings are placed on a workbench. Gibbons's sculpture is built up in layers of separate carving, nailed together. On a bench, these layers can be taken apart for inspection and repair, then reassembled with non-rusting fasteners. Missing petals or leaves or stems can be replaced, if they are sufficiently documented, greatly improving the carvings visually and sometimes structurally.

Finally, dismounting the carvings allows them to be put back on the walls using a hanging method rather than a permanent fixing, so that they can be removed for cleaning or in emergencies (as in the Hampton Court fire in 1986, when Gibbons's carvings were damaged because they were nailed to the wall and could not quickly be removed).

In 1996, when word got out that it was inclining towards conserving the Petworth work in situ, the National Trust was persuaded to seek the advice of David Luard, undoubtedly the most experienced of all conservators at handling Gibbons's carvings. In the course of his work at Hampton Court Palace and at many other sites, Luard has removed scores of delicate carvings from oak wainscoting, including many at the National Trust's own property, Lyme Park in Cheshire.

Luard has the forthright professional air of someone for whom worm-riddled sculpture and rusting nails hold no terrors. Like a surgeon who understands that the axiom "first do no harm" does not mean that the use of scalpels is prohibited, Luard tends to view the dangerous fragility of a carving as precisely a reason to intervene decisively. He avers that with his wooden wedges, his methodical approach, and his understanding of the strong and weak points of Gibbons's sculpture, he has never damaged a carving in prising it off the wall.

After a tour of inspection at Petworth, Luard recommended that the carvings be removed for treatment. His advice was declined. He was not invited to carry out a trial dismounting, and the Trust proceeded to conserve the carvings in place, using a weak consolidant.

Rowell and Hart recall things differently. Rowell says that "overall, in the end, in terms of treatment, he very much saw our point of view. He certainly wasn't recommending something completely different." No, says Luard; despite his advice, "it became apparent that there was a determination not to remove the carvings." Luard then resorted to identifying the carvings that he felt most critically demanded removal. Copies of his reports support Luard's account of his recommendations.

The effect of the National Trust's consolidation is virtually invisible, but the effect of its decisions about the presentation of Gibbons's carvings, their appearance and setting, is altogether visible.

Some history, first. The present Carved Room was the creation of the 3rd Earl of Egremont in the 1790s, a century after Gibbons completed his work. In the original, smaller room, Gibbons mounted his principal carvings on the partition walls, so as to give them a raking side light from the windows. But, to create a grand dining room, the 3rd Earl knocked down a wall to make a space about twice the size of the original chamber.

He then fixed Gibbons's most important work on the rear wall of the new room, facing the harsh and flattening frontal light from the windows. In the centre of this same wall, above the fireplace, he mounted a large overmantel by the Petworth "house carver" of Gibbons's era, John Selden, introducing the first note of stylistic discrepancy into the scene.

Worse was to come. Enter, in the 1820s, another carver, the singular Jonathan Ritson. "It was no unusual occurrence to find him for days and nights in a state of drunken insensibility, clothed in rags and consorting with chimney-sweepers and trampers," his obituary reported. Ritson was capable of quirky, finely-detailed work. But his design skill was deficient, his undercutting often cursory, and his grasp of the scale necessary for carving to be read at a distance sadly lacking.

However, the 3rd Earl, whose taste as a patron did not in every case equal his munificence, seems to have thought Ritson quite the equal of Gibbons. He hung Ritson's portrait next to one of Gibbons, and commissioned his new protege to fill every remaining nook and cranny of the Carved Room with his 19th-century version of Gibbons's style.

The effect of this eclectic, scabby profusion of carving seems to have been unpleasant even to Victorian tastes that inclined towards teeming ornament.

Ritson died in 1846, and his carvings remained in place only until 1870, when, immediately upon inheriting, the Earl's grandson removed them. The National Trust's press release ascribes this to "changing fashions". That's one way of putting it. Another would be to say that not only did the quality of the new carving debase Gibbons's adjacent masterpieces, but also, as a family member recalled, "the quantity of Ritson's work entirely destroyed the balance and scheme of Gibbons's decoration of the room."

Of course, the decorative scheme was the 3rd Earl's, not Gibbons's. But the writer has a point. In his time, Gibbons's showpieces virtually never shared space with the work of other woodcarvers. And Gibbons displayed a marked preference for bare walls to either side of his great overmantels and picture surrounds.

Gibbons's grand campaign was to lift woodcarving from the role of decoration, marginal texture for the eye, to something closer to the status of sculpture. His Petworth work, for example, makes learned references to Roman sculpture, Renaissance drawing and contemporary opera. Such is the presence and symbolic richness of these greatest of his "decorative" carvings that they demand the kind of attention and connoisseurship usually reserved for substantial works of sculpture.

But now the National Trust has taken the Ritson carvings out of storage and returned them to the walls of the Carved Room. The result is that Gibbons's work is now cheek by jowl with, sometimes nearly touching, inferior carving executed to a different agenda.

What spawned this scheme is the power of a name even bigger than Grinling Gibbons's. Among the recipients of the 3rd Earl of Egremont's less eccentric patronage was JMW Turner, from whom he accumulated no fewer than 20 paintings. In the 1820s, the 3rd Earl commissioned four small landscapes to be placed, oddly, just below four large ancestral portraits in the Carved Room.

It seems clear that the motive behind the National Trust's project has been an ardent resolve to return these pictures to their original places in the Carved Room, so that they can be viewed "in the exact setting for which they were commissioned." Except that the paintings' original setting was nothing like the dark-brown panelled chamber that is the present Carved Room. You wouldn't know it from the press releases, but the 3rd Earl had the Carved Room painted white a decade or so before Turner arrived at Petworth. (The paint was removed, along with the Ritson carvings, in 1870.) Few would want to replicate that particular impulse of the 3rd Earl. But the consequence is that the present room, in its overall brown impression, is not an authentic context for Turner's landscapes. It has been argued that Turner's darkened paintings now work better in a dark setting. But this is to throw overboard any pretence of historical accuracy, and along with it the impulse that begot the project in the first place.

Problems with colour don't stop there. We do instinctively tend to think of wood, and especially carved wood, as a shade of medium or dark brown, and so we don't find it surprising that the carvings at Petworth are tonally close to the oak-grained panelling on which they are mounted. But Gibbons's medium was limewood, which is a light cream colour, and one of his innovations was to leave his work without finish, so that his carving floated, ethereal, pale and frothy, above the darker panelling on which it was mounted.

Gibbons's contemporaries recorded their surprise at this paleness, which brings carving to the fore of any decorating scheme. Gibbons himself was given a sizeable annuity at Windsor Castle to keep his carvings clean and preserve this effect. But as the decades wore on after his death, oxidation and smoke took their toll, darkening the carvings so that their contrast with the panelling was lost.

Around the beginning of the 19th century, at Hampton Court, at Windsor Castle, at Oxford and Cambridge, and probably elsewhere too, owners took a bold but understandable step: they applied a white lime wash to the carvings, which returned them to something like their original tonality while still allowing the wood surface to be perceived. This calcium carbonate coats the surface like a kind of dust, and over the years gradually falls away.

The National Trust long resisted the notion that Gibbons's Petworth carvings were ever lightened, an idea that would have unsettling consequences for their presentation of the work.

But the evidence that the 3rd Earl limed the carvings in 1814, if not before, is overwhelming. In the archival records from 1814, there is a reference to the use of whitewash as well as white paint in the Carved Room. In 1833, a visitor wrote of the "dirty washed wood on the white walls". Photographs from the early 20th century show decidedly light carvings, sometimes with the grain of the wood concealed by a surface coating. Recently, in the archives of the Country Life photographic library, images were found from 1907 showing the Petworth carvings with a dusty white coating, beginning to fall away in patches.

To clinch the matter, deposits found in crannies in the carvings were analysed recently and found to be calcium carbonate.

Yet the idea continues to be resisted. Perhaps, John Hart says, "somebody was a bit careless when they came around to painting the ceiling". And he and Christopher Rowell have pointed to the fact that when the Ritson carvings have been analysed they have always been found not to have been treated in any manner during the 19th century. Since Ritson would have presented his carvings in a way that would harmonise with the Gibbons work, does this not indicate that Gibbons's carvings also were never limed?

In fact, it decisively shows the opposite. Untreated, Gibbons's work, after a century and a half in the fug of the Carved Room, would be very dark. By contrast, Ritson's new carving would be the creamy pale colour of fresh limewood. That Ritson left his work untouched strongly suggests that what he was matching was not untreated wood, but wood that been whitened.

Ritson's carvings themselves would quickly have browned in the Carved Room atmosphere. And there's evidence that this is just what happened. A visitor in 1862 reported that the carvings surrounding the Turner paintings were "of a light brown colour". This can be seen in a painting of the Carved Room done in about 1865. The 17th-century carving is clearly picked out in white, and the Ritson work in between is a light brown tone.

"We are not ruling out the possibility that it [Gibbons's work] may have been limed," Christopher Rowell conceded in a recent conversation. But he has never been persuaded to apply lime wash to any carving in the refurbished Carved Room. "The general picture was a variety of browns, and carving which for various reasons has darkened," and this "was so much an overall effect that to have changed that, I think, would have been extremely radical and it wasn't the way in which we wanted to go".

The result? An agreeable room that never existed at any point in its history, and an unhappy home for Gibbons. The Carved Room answers perfectly to our expectations of what a carved room should be: full of texture whichever way we look; walls and carving a concordant tone of brown; the carving most effective seen from a distance, where it impresses by its sheer volume; the whole is almost too rich to take in, and not very encouraging of close inspection. It did not occur to the National Trust to produce a key to identify the carvings by Gibbons or Selden or Ritson, perhaps because these distinctions don't seem very important in the actual experience of the room. In deepening shadows, Gibbons sleeps on.

There are no plans to remove his carvings from the walls for a full restoration. But the perspicacious Alastair Laing, curator of pictures and sculpture for the National Trust, has offered some hope for the future. "I think we all would accept that we haven't reached the end of the road at this point at all." The idea of experimenting with the reapplication of lime wash to some or all of the Petworth carvings seems not to have been ruled out.

However, the decision must wait until all the paintings in the room have been cleaned, so that their final brightness can determine the tone of their setting. "Unless and until the Turners are cleaned, it would be very difficult to make their settings any lighter than they are. We and the Tate will take the decision about cleaning the Turners before we do anything."

The uncontested leading man of the 1692 room, Grinling Gibbons, is now reduced to a supporting role, to be outfitted in the costume that best sets off the finery of the newly arrived star, whose name is JMW Turner.

David Esterly is the author of 'Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving'